Facebook Again in Spotlight on Privacy

Photo-Recognition Technology Sparks Privacy Concerns

Facebook Inc. stoked fresh concerns from privacy advocates and lawmakers in the U.S. and Europe by rolling out technology that uses facial recognition to identify people in photos on its website.

Facebook stoked fresh concerns by rolling out technology that uses facial recognition to identify people in photos on its website. Geoffrey Fowler explains.

One woman in the Netherlands can no longer "un-friend" 152 of her nearest and dearest acquaintances on Facebook. In fact, she's taken friendship to a whole new level by tattooing the profile pictures of her Facebook friends onto every inch of her right arm.

The technology was designed to help Facebook users mark friends in photos as they upload them to the social-networking site. Facebook first introduced the tool to U.S. users in December, and added it to most of the rest of the world this week, prompting privacy officials in Europe to open investigations.

Face-recognition technology is just the latest Facebook product that privacy advocates say goes over the line. It reprises a longstanding divide with privacy advocates over whether new Facebook services should be automatically turned on for users who might not be aware of them.

The face-recognition tool is enabled for all users by default.

The need for users to opt-out of the service drew some ire from Congress. On Wednesday, Massachusetts Rep. Edward J. Markey said Facebook ought to have made the technology "opt-in" for users. "If this new feature is as useful as Facebook claims, it should be able to stand on its own, without an automatic sign-up that changes users' privacy settings without their permission," said Rep. Markey.

At least one regulator in Europe said it had opened a probe. The Ireland data protection authority is investigating the feature, and is seeking input from Facebook, a spokeswoman said.

In a statement, Facebook said it "should have been more clear with people during the roll-out process when this became available to them." The company said it has been contacted by regulators and was responding to their inquiries to "satisfy any concerns they will have."

The technology also raises concerns that Facebook has built a potentially sensitive database of its more than 600 million users based on their facial characteristics, even as other tech titans such as Google Inc. say they've stopped short of adding facial recognition to some of their services.

"Facebook users thought they were simply tagging their friends. Turns out Facebook was building an image profile database to automate online identification," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy group based in Washington.

Facebook said the technology only makes suggestions when people add new photos to the site, and it only suggests identities from a users' existing set of friends on the site. "If for any reason someone doesn't want their name to be suggested, they can disable the feature in their Privacy Settings," the company said.

"Our concern, as usual, is that Facebook is making changes to its privacy and creating new features without giving people sufficient notice and giving them a choice as to whether they want to participate," said Chris Conley, of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.

Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes said the company has received "almost no user complaints," suggesting "people are enjoying the feature and are finding it useful." He said Facebook had made turning off the feature "easy and explained how to do so on our blog, in our Help Center, and within the interface."

The potential ethical challenges of face-recognition technology have been a sensitive subject for technology companies, particularly as the capabilities for it grow more sophisticated—and potentially available in smartphones.

Google has said it built facial recognition technology for smartphones into a product known as Google Goggles, but withheld it. "As far as I know, it's the only technology that Google built and after looking at it, we decided to stop," said Google Chairman Eric Schmidt last week at a Wall Street Journal conference. "People could use this stuff in a very, very bad way as well as in a good way."

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